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But the farsighted and analytical statesman did manage to wrest his own homeland from the grip of czarism and from two other powers, Austria and Prussia.

That’s the standard view: Even Stalin, no admirer of czarism, put a positive gloss on Peter’s reign.

Though the Cold War ended a quarter-century ago, we are still accustomed to thinking of Vladimir Putin as a global actor, a representative of eternal Russian interests, the inheritor of czarism/Lenin/Stalin, a man who inhabits a Kissingerian world of state actors who compete against other state actors for control over territory, all of them playing a gigantic game of Risk.

Though the Cold War ended a quarter century ago, we are still accustomed to thinking of Vladimir Putin as a global actor, a representative of eternal Russian interests, the inheritor of czarism/Lenin/Stalin, a man who inhabits a Kissingerian world of state actors who compete against other state actors for control over territory, all of them playing a gigantic game of Risk.

Ministers of the doomed czarist order, and Nicholas II himself, come to life here, as do peripheral figures like Kaiser Wilhelm II and Benito Mussolini, and, of course, the main figures: Lenin, Felix Dzerzhinsky, Trotsky and the other young Bolshevik zealots who somehow navigated through the rubble of czarism and war to create a revolutionary state, only to hand it in the end to Stalin.